How do we envision Pride?
This month's digital workshop imagines a future of Pride.
Every year when Pride Month rolls around, we return like moths to a flame to perennial discourses about what Pride should (and shouldn’t) be. Some of them go back as long as I can remember; the “people shouldn’t be too sexual at Pride” was bopping around AOL chat rooms when I was first coming out as gay. “Does kink belong at Pride?” seemed to come and go in my individual experience. And these days, now that I’m part of the ace community, we get the “Pride excludes aces” and ace-specific versions of the sexual discourses, because who can ever have enough discourses?
I think in all the shoulds and shouldn’ts of Pride Month discourses, what gets lost is a practice I think should be central to our experience of Pride: exploring and articulating what Pride means to us in the present and engaging in some future-minded thinking about what we want Pride to look like for future generations.
In Cruising Utopia, José Esteban Muñoz talks about how queer people should position themselves to the notions of the present and the future. He writes:
“The present is not enough. It is impoverished and toxic for queers and other people who do not feel the privilege of majoritarian belonging, normative tastes, and “rational” expectations… Let me be clear that the idea is not simply to turn away from the present. One cannot afford such a maneuver, and if one thinks one can, one has resisted the present in favor of folly. The present must be known in relation to the alternative temporal and spatial maps provided by a perception of past and future affective worlds.”
Taking Muñoz’s direction here and applying it to thinking about what Pride can mean to us: it’s not quite enough to simply envision Pride as we have it today, but we also need to envision futures of Pride (and futures for ourselves) that honor the pasts we’ve walked and lived. I think we all can agree that the present is not enough. Particularly this present, which is every day increasingly queerphobic and transphobic. It’s great for us to love and enjoy the Pride we feel and celebrate in this present moment, but to envision a future that is more queer, more equitable, more collective, more care-full — and to then imagine the shape of Pride as it could exist in that kind of world — is necessary to fill in the gaps that the present fails to provide.
That’s just what we’re doing in this month’s digital workshop.
The Pride Month digital workshop focuses on a collaborative digital collage-making activity in which we’ll explore the notion of Pride for ourselves and perhaps dream forward some visions of what Pride could look like for us down the road. It will be a moment for us to gather (digitally), place our various experiences, beliefs, and visions for Pride next to each other’s and consider what the whole might inspire us to pursue. It’s a workshop I’m really excited about.
The workshop will begin with a brief writing exercise and then we’ll shift to a collaborative board where we’ll begin the collage activity. There will be time at the end for us to discuss what we’ve made together.
For past participants in digital workshops, this one’s going to be a very different experience. We’ll have space to actually interact and connect with each other, and collectively make something together in real time.
One more from Muñoz:
“Indeed, to live inside straight time and ask for, desire, and imagine another time and place is to represent and perform a desire that is both utopian and queer.”
Let’s imagine another time and place together to celebrate Pride Month.
Envisioning Aspec Pride: A Collaborative Collage Workshop will take place online on June 21 at 12 p.m. eastern. Information on registering can be found here.
For discounts on digitial workshops (and other Ace Dad content), you can join my Patreon community at the Friends Circle or Advocates Circle tiers. You can check out the Patreon community here.